1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a broadcast receiving device which is communicably connected to a wide area network and a broadcast receiving system which includes the broadcast receiving device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Video distribution over the Internet is spreading, concurrently with development of higher-performance personal computers (PCs) and use of wider bandwidth for internet access. In the video distribution over the Internet, a video signal is compressed by using video compression technology such as MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) to obtain a compressed signal, and the compressed signal is transmitted to a PC over a network. The PC decodes the compressed signal and displays a video corresponding to the decoded video signal on a monitor.
Furthermore, digital television broadcasting is also rapidly progressed. In the digital television broadcasting, a video signal is compressed according to the MPEG standard to obtain digital streaming data, and the digital streaming data is transmitted on a carrier wave to a home digital TV.
Both of the video distribution over the Internet and the digital television broadcasting use similar digital video/audio streams. Videos distributed over the Internet generally reach PCs; on the other hand, digital television broadcasts are generally viewed on digital TV receivers.
By additionally having digital television broadcast receiving tuners, the PCs can display digital broadcast videos on PC screens. On the other hand, internet TVs have been developed as the digital TV receivers capable of viewing streaming data transmitted over a network. An example of the internet TV is disclosed in Japanese Patent Kokai Publication No. 2001-94966 (FIG. 1), which is referred to as “Patent Document 1”.
Generally, in a case of the digital TV receivers which additionally have a function of accessing the Internet, users selects contents from the Internet by using a browser or the like and the digital television receivers display a picture base on the selected contents on TV screens. The digital TV receivers generally have built-in processors. Some built-in processors are insufficient in processing capability to produce and display a graphical user interface such as a browser, and others are not capable of mounting the graphical user interface such as a browser. Some browsers which can be installed on the built-in processors are inferior to browsers on PCs in performance, such as available website descriptions: a website can be displayed by a browser on a PC, whereas the website cannot be displayed by a browser on a built-in processor. These problems of the digital TV receivers can be solved by improving performance of the built-in processors or improving hardware performance such as increasing memory size. However, improving the hardware performance causes an increase in cost of the devices.
Moreover, because the digital TV receivers use decoders which are hardware devices for solely processing received compression signals, it is difficult for the digital TV receivers to receive signals other than signals designated in the hardware devices in advance.